Dumb Pundit Comments

Cross Posted at The Next Right

Cal Thomas on Gov. Palin: She needs to go home and reinvent herself.
(As though crowds of 20,000+ and a 91% favorable rating among Republicans are kind of below normal. Guess Cal wants her to be just as exciting and as all the other politicians.)
Comment on Fox News Watch, 11/15/08

Peggy Noonan (whose new book, Patriotic Grace, is an “an urgent, heartfelt call for all Americans to see each other anew, realize what time it is, and come together to support the next President—whoever he is. Because it is not the threats and challenges we face, but how we face them that defines us as a nation.”): Young Republicans can have a joy in being out of power now. “You get to criticize with complete abandon. This is the pleasurable side of what the donkey knows, which is that it's easier to knock over the barn than build it.”

David Brooks: "The second part of Obama’s plan is the creation of an auto czar with vague duties. Other smart people have called for such a czar to reorganize the companies and force the companies to fully embrace green technology and other good things.

"That would be great, but if Obama was such a fervent believer in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats, he should have mentioned it during the campaign. Are we really to believe there exists a czar omniscient, omnipotent and beneficent enough to know how to fix the Big Three? Who is this deity? Are we to believe that political influence will miraculously disappear, that the czar would have absolute power over unions, management, Congress and the White House? Please."
[emphasis mine]

Maybe Brooks was paying more attention to his knee tingling than to the campaign. As Jennifer Rubin points out:

"Perhaps Brooks missed it, but at every turn during the campaign, Obama gave us plenty of warning that he believes 'in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats.' Government bureaucrats are going to control lots of things in the Obama administration. They are going to decide which size of business must carry health insurance, and the type of insurance they must have. They are going to decide what type of energy is worth subsidizing, and which projects will get billions in taxpayer funding. They are going to tell the whole world the labor standards they must abide by in order to trade with us. And on it goes. It really isn’t quite fair to say we were not warned. Maybe not on this particular item. But Obama’s penchant for having the 'deity' of government command and control a great many things was hard to miss during the campaign."